Complexity -- it's everywhere we look. If you're working to engage communities and create meaningful, sustainable change, then you're going to come up against complexity. This becomes even more complicated when you're not only trying to make change, but evaluate your efforts in making change.
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This is different work, this work of Collective Impact. It requires us to deepen relationships with each other and to build new relationshipswith individuals we may not have worked with previously. It calls upon us to take a new leadership journey, not one that is focused on our own work but one that is focused on a collective, often aspirational, approach to understanding and changing our communities.
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The July issue of The Philanthropist profiles the theory and practice of collective impact. The issue contains articles from a variety of perspectives and provides a great overview from Canadian and international thought leaders on how collective impact is evolving.
I had the opportunity to contribute two articles to this publication. One of them looked at the promise and peril of collective impact and the second was an interview that I conducted with John Kania and Fay Hanleybrown of FSG Social Impact Consultants just before a Backbone Workshop in Vancouver earlier this spring.
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I wonder.
Have we have been hoodwinked. co-opted, and led to the altar of a false god – or at the very least, an imperfect one?
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There is increasing interest in the design and execution of Collective Impact collaborations. The five conditions of collective impact, on the surface, seem both intuitive and appropriate. It’s the execution that often has us spinning. Collective Impact is, as my colleague and fellow blogger Jay Connor so effectively says, about working differently. (Read his blog – www.workingdifferently.org for more insights about how hard this is to get right - hard but not impossible.)
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Collective impact is all the rage these days. The concepts put forward in the paper that appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in the Winter 2011 by FSG Social Impact Consultants have resonated with collaborative tables across Canada, the United States and internationally. The five conditions of collective impact include a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication and a backbone infrastructure. Simple in design, much more challenging in the practice.
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